31 December 2008

A New Year's modern surprise at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (Updated)

... a triumphant display of works inspired by the Museum's own collection

What a great start to the New Year!

The Dutch artist Bierenbroodspot opened her new exhibition of paintings and sculpture, drawings and giant prints 4 x 5 metres (12' x 15') -- hanging like sunlit banners on the museum walls -- which I read as prose poems or like pages from a time-travel diary.

In this unique exhibition, we see how a modern artist re-interprets the past by viewing her work almost side-by-side with the original pieces that inspired her.

An offering which the pharaoh gives Sekhmet, the Great, Lady of Heaven that she may grant power in heaven, strength on earth and a good name for her beloved, the Overseer of Craftsmen and Chief of Goldsmiths, Gerti Bierenbroodspot.

For countless generations, artists have freely incorporated elements from distant cultures to create new visual forms. Archaeologists and art historians are always studying (and being stymied by) such 'influences' and artistic interdependence. Bierenbroodspot takes this ‘re-mix’ one step further: she uses a modern Museum’s archaeological treasures as the starting point for her art, creating from the ancient objects a highly personal vision of a modernity grand in theme as well as in manner. To create this ground-breaking show, Bierenbroodspot received the keys of the Museum, free to wander at will -- enter any vault, open any display, sit in the hidden hall of the mummies, rummage through the racks in the basements -- sketching whichever items struck her artist’s eye.

Follow her trajectory through the Museum. Click on the video (Warning: downloading is slow, so I suggest that you read on until it starts. Impatient readers may click via her website instead. The music is from cellist Ernst Reijseger'sRequiem for a Dying Planet).

In the Ideal Museum

Bierenbroodspot went on a barefooted journey of discovery through the Museum (without footwear, she feels freer, her mind more open to improvisation). The barefoot artist -- smudged with paint, and laden with papyrus, rice paper, quills, brushes, inks and powders -- followed magic signs and golden lines through the galleries to reach a mythical abode, Beyond the Horizon.

The Muses do not wait; they decide over the Holy Fire, the DivineInspiration, when and where they want to share it with the artist...

But it is not history that interests her: as she paints them, objects become re-newed, the transmutation of art giving them again the power of dreams.

When Bierenbroodspot saw the bronze horse bits from Luristan or inscribed clay tablets from Sumer, she stopped and had them out of their cases and in her hands. Re-used in her art, these things that are silent and past get a new vision, as in a magic theatre or divine rite. A polished bronze Corinthian-Greek hoplite helmet or the ornate gilded silver face-mask of a Roman knight become eerily like, in feel, twelve bronze helmets from the armoury of Atlantis that Bierenbroodspot cast for her record-breaking show, Atlantis Rising:

round and domed helmets encrusted with fiery green or turquoise patina, with pins, tubes and metal strips attached to vanished crests, worn by warriors in a dream-like world. These are the faces of an invisible army, with gabled brows and eye-holes sharply drawn out, and sun disks glittering with gold enamel. Helmets that have power, and that shock.

The phalanx of helmets stands in the hall of the Isis (Taffeh) temple. Where once stood imperial statues, there are two massive bronze heads, Bierenbroodspot’s Fallen Gods, guardians of a lost civilization; and, nearby, the Last King of Atlantis, lordly and full of pride, the fragment of a colossal statue cast in the here-and-now.

Finally, Bierenbroodspot descended into the mummy hall, a place closed to the public. Museums have an ethical dispute with mummies: are they fit objects for display or, as human remains, are they entitled to eternal rest? Bierenbroodspot, as an artist, treats them with sacred dignity.

Over this image that is sketched on a clean, unused sheet of papyrus with powder of emerald green glaze mixed with myrrh and water. Say, "I am an initiate, void of sins. There is nothing I do not know about Truth."

She thinks of the mural scene of the deathbed of Queen Nefertari, carved like a lion’s body, with the goddesses Isis and Nephtys to guard her mummy, as two hovering hawks. Hieroglyphs with birds and animals flutter around her protective tent, magic spells to help the dead as they make the dangerous journey Beyond the Horizon.

She painted the head of a mummy, blackened by age, now spending its afterlife as an unexpected artist’s model. She (a female head, according to Bierenbroodspot) grimaces at the painter, her upper lip drawn back to bare her teeth. "It’s a smile," says Bierenbroodspot. "I am bringing her back to life. That’s why the Pharaohs let me paint them."

Beyond the Horizon is antiquity re-emerging, and a limitless unique moment in space.

** Visit Bierenbroodspot's Beyond the Horizon at the National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) until 22 February 2009. A catalogue is available. Click for a free e-card. If you can't get to Leiden in time, visit her website and click on 'Beyond the Horizon' in the menu.

Update: 14 January 2009

Due to the unprecedented number of visitors, the Museum announced yesterday that Beyond the Horizon, originally slated to run until 22 February, has been extended through 3 May 2009. So, anyone planning a trip to the tulip fields in the spring, can scoot over to nearby Leiden as well. Don't miss it!

21 December 2008

Swelling bellies, ample curves, and the milk-filled breasts of a pregnant woman -- what could be more natural, and evocative?

Reproducer Venus, fat and fertile.

A Palaeolithic man needed a woman who would bear him lots of children. Not a pretty face but a “faceless fertile being" with a strongly emphasized vulva to produce a continuing supply of young humans. And, if she got too fat in the process, well, there's just more of her to impregnate. So men carved desirable images of obese, passive, child-bearing nurturers -- another weapon in the armoury of Palaeolithic magic. Perhaps these ladies were divine in some sense, but, if so, that was restricted to a place in cults of fertility acted out by men and for men. This was the early 20th century prehistorians' view -- and there may well be a certain amount of truth in it.

But not enough to carry the weight of the theory. For it should have been obvious (even at the time) that this could not have been the whole story. Some Venuses didn't fit the model.

Someone may have unkindly pointed out, too, that there are no carved children. If Palaeolithic Tarzans were obsessed with the need for abundant offspring, they (literally) didn't show it.

So fertility was combined with another idea.

From Palaeolithic Reproducer to Mother Goddess

Johann Bachofen had already proposed the existence of the Neolithic cult of the female deity and prehistoric matriarchy in Mutterrechtund Urreligion (Mother Right and the Origins of Religion) in 1861. He believed that women and Mother-centred religion had dominated in the epochs before recorded history.

In this once-upon-a-time-world, women were

the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead.

In short, the first gods were female and women ruled the earth. In this era, women mated promiscuously and "every woman's womb was the mortal image of the Earth Mother". Everyone was sister, brother, uncle, or aunt to everybody else, a world of unimaginable equality or, as Bachofen described it, "the undifferentiated unity of the mass." It sounds as if he pictured Mutterrecht society as a kind of human beehive. A beehive throbbing with inchoate forms of She-worship:

Whirling round and round in dance until "the beasts and all the mountain seemed wild with divinity."

Of course, such happy, chaotic times couldn't last. Too bodily-busy, sticky (if not steamy), and oblivious to the individual, the Mother was destined to be replaced by paternal rule. The stars transited from the warm lucent bubble of livingness to the celestial, Olympian right of the father.* Out went the She-god, in came the He-god -- and with him, hierarchical male-dominated religions, and male control of females. This "world historical defeat of the female sex", as Friedrich Engels phrased it, was not only inevitable ... but for women's own good: obscene disorder was suppressed and women came under the protection of individual men.

Whoopee.

The Neolithic Goddess in the Rear-view Mirror

Although the evidence for an ancient Mother Goddess religion is much stronger in Neolithic archaeology (popularly connected with the writings of the Marija Gimbutas), theories that include the Palaeolithic figurines as ritualistic representations of an even older Mother Goddess are quite common.

Gertrude Rachel Levy's study of Stone Age religion, The Gate of Horn (1948) was strong on the continuity of female religious traditions from Upper Palaeolithic people who "bequeathed to all humanity a foundation of ideas upon which the mind could raise its structures": the cave as the female womb; the mother as a pregnant earth; the magical fertile female as the mother of all animals. Levy assumed that the Venus figurines were

the first step in the establishment of a relationship between the human group and the One [the goddess].

Well, maybe. She had an interesting idea, though, about why the early Venuses usually lacked extremities: "the general unimportance among the statues of face, hands, and feet may have originated in fears of magic dangers” -- as seen, for example, in modern voodoo dolls. Having made a potential connection between an anthropomorphic figure of a specific person and the resulting power over that individual, Levy left the idea hanging and took refuge in vague references to their role in a "cult of human fertility".

What's a Fertility Cult Anyway?

Obviously, many Venuses have pronounced sexual characteristics but all that really tells us is that there was an undoubted (and unsurprising) interest in sexuality.

It says nothing about cult.

The word 'cult' implies beliefs and rituals, or at least performances. So any ' fertility cult' requires some kind of ritualistic performance that aimed to promote animal, vegetable or human procreation. Needless to say, we rarely find archaeological evidence demonstrating such performances in any prehistoric period, let alone in the Upper Palaeolithic.

What about 'fertility' by itself, then?

It's an inconvenient fact that those hunter-gatherer societies which survived into the early 20th centuries did not seem especially concerned with fertility. Not a perfect analogy (to be sure) but the best we have. The importance of fertility only becomes apparent during the transition into communities based on agricultural and pastoral production. Still, archaeologists can really only hope to unveil the meaning of the Venuses by analogy of some sort -- which means borrowing ideas from various other disciplines (psychology, phenomenology of religions, anthropology, or -- to be very up-to-date -- neuroscience) .

Zenobia will do her re-reading of the past through the lens of feminism.

You Tarzan, Me Jane

Feminist scholars of the 1960's began to question the research methods and male chauvinism apparent in earlier studies of the female figurines. Citing Bachofen’s Mutterrecht theory (despite its dire biases), they revived his primeval matriarchies and the belief that ‘mother-right’ was important in early religion:

[The] female body was a symbol of cosmological significance ....

If the female body was one of the most widespread and elaborate images of the Old Stone Age, and a symbol for the various forces of nature and the various aspects of culture, would it really be so far from the mark to believe that the figurines actually embody aspects of the Paleolithic worship of a goddess?

In their interpretations, feminist writers imagined the first religion as the deification of the female. The SHE-body is now a multivalent, multi-purpose symbol which can be utilized both for the understanding of and worship of a goddess-figure.

This is the viewpoint of the goddess-books published from the 1970's to the early 1990's, many of which went whizzing off into quasi-mystical realms

the mystery of the female body is the mystery of birth, which is also the mystery of the unmanifest becoming the manifest in the whole of nature

Archaeology definitely takes a back seat. And prehistoric women are transformed into “some kind of super-beings revered by submissive males for their femaleness and their ability to produce children”.

And all because the stupid men didn't know about the birds and the bees:

It is plausible, though not certain, that the first humans were unaware of the exact role of the male in procreation, not having established a causal relationship between coitus and parturition. Thus, their attitude toward the female, apparently weaker than the male, but mysteriously able to produce life, was ambiguous: a profound respect, if not veneration, and, at the same time, a kind of terror in the face of incomprehensible, even magic or divine, powers. The statuettes called ‘Venus callipyges,’ ["of the beautiful bum"] of the well-known Lespugue type, are a decisive argument in favor of this thesis, because, in these representations, a divine maternal power is undeniable [and it is] probable that primitive humanity regarded divinity, whatever that was, as feminine in nature.

The only problem with this overheated argument is that the largest group of Venuses represent non-pregnant adult females. Instead of simply being obese or pregnant, many figurines appear to be young, pre-pubescent girls who have very small or no breasts and diminutive fatty deposits -- which surely means that the Venus figurines must represent different aspects of womanhood, not just motherhood.

So, serious studies nowadays reject fertility, ritual, feminine power or prestige, and cast about for other, lesser meanings to explain the variety of Venus figurines. They could be good-luck amulets, for example, or initiation figures, obstetrician teaching tools, puppets, priestesses, witches, or banshees to scare away strangers. A Venus-in-hand might help a woman in childbirth, or calm a fretful man like a string of primordial worry-beads. Finally, Venuses might mean nothing at all, being examples only of Palaeolithic experimentation with the technique of carving.

Girls Will Be Girls

The 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference changed the way anthropologists thought about hunter-gatherer societies. New research showed that such societies were sexually egalitarian, and thus the idea that men and women were once equal finally took root. Studies began to demonstrate women's contributions to subsistence. The he-manly mammoth hunter, beloved of 19th century prehistorians, turned out to be a dud as the main food provider -- though there is an undoubted cultural value in sharing meat and the prestige it bestows upon men with strong hunting skills. Analysis showed that women produced an average of 2/3rds of the calories for the group, a result of their highly-skilled gathering forays. During those forays, incidentally, women also often caught small game, thus producing protein-munchies as well as veg and nuts.

Possibly, it was the women's contributions -- and not the big-game of male hunters -- that assured the survival of the species.

While !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert, Australian desert Aborigines and polar Eskimos, of course, are not carbon copies of our Palaeolithic ancestors, they do share important features in social behaviour and values. Since they have never been in contact with each other, it's very likely that the shared features reflect a common social and environmental situation ... and thus it's reasonable to assume that European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had similar social organisation, values, and ways of thinking.

I suggest that one should make use of what we know about contemporary hunter-gatherers in order to imagine the motivations of prehistoric artists:

A centrality of women, or a special relevance of them or even a state of gender equality, has very probably been an important adaptive factor in the emergence of Homo sapiens out of all the different evolutionary experiments attempted by non-human Hominids. In simple terms, human evolution may well have acted on the gender that most invested in reproduction, nurturing and caring, a concept often [proposed] by female evolution scientists, but stubbornly ignored by their male colleagues and museum directors, who continue to display the evolution of Man the Hunter, with small women squatting in the background.**

The Venus figurines may well reflect women's centrality (not political power) in the human adventure. The figurines range from realistic to symbolic representations of women but, regardless of the degree of realism, all or some female attributes are emphasised: breasts, vulva, and the natural female pattern of fat distribution on legs, hips and buttocks. These are clearly the attributes the carvers wished to emphasize.

If we accept that prehistoric artists represented forms that were important for them, carving a Venus was a way of expressing emotions and sharing them with others, just as contemporary artists, singers and dancers do. This is not art for art’s sake or aesthetics, it is communication.**

Will we ever know what they were saying?

No, I don't think so.

As my dissertation supervisor used to say, "That, Judith, is not an archaeological question."

* Citations in this section from Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstacy (1997) 37-39.

** Piero P. Giorgi, "A new interpretation of female symbols and figures produced in prehistoric Europe: the hypothesis of the centrality of women", in Valcamonica Symposium 2007.

Other Main Sources

On fertility cults, Emmanuel Anati, "The Question of Fertility Cults", in (A. Bonanno, ed.) Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, 1985, 2-16. On Venuses, Alexander Marshack "The Female Image: a 'Time-factored' Symbol, in Proc. Prehistoric Society 57 (1991) 17-31; Patricia Rice, "Prehistoric Venuses: Symbols of Motherhood or Womanhood?" Jrl. Anthropological Research 37 (1981) 402-14; once again, I have made much use of K.D. Jennett's paper Female Figurines of the Upper Paleolithic (2008).

06 December 2008

Steatopygia is a genetic condition marked by an excess of fat on the buttocks, layers of fat that often extend down the front and sides of the thighs. In the modern world, it is common only among the females of certain African peoples, notably the Khoikhoi ('Hottentots'), San (Bushwomen), and Pygmies.

Internally, the buttocks of steatopygous women consist of masses of fat incorporated between criss-crossed sheets of connective tissue joined to one another in a regular manner.

How much rump is a big, fat rump?

The degree of steatopygia is recorded as the shortest distance between the deepest point in the hollow of the back and a plane, placed at right angles to the median sagittal,* just touching the most posterior point of the buttocks. Among the adult Kalahari Bushwomen, this averages 7.8 cm (3"), with a maximum of 11½ cm (4½") ; among Bushwomen of the Cape Province, a range of 7½ – 15 cm (3 – 6") has been measured.

Another way of looking at it is based on the sharpness of the angle between back and buttocks: steatopygia strictly speaking is diagnosed at an angle of about 90 degrees.

In that case, not even the famous Venus of Willendorf (above centre) qualifies as steatopygous. She -- and most other Venuses -- have an almost nymph-like angle of about 120 degrees between back and buttocks.

No matter. Enter scientists.

The Missing Link

Although Venus buttocks rarely stand at right angles, they are unarguably ample. As these figurines began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they first stunned, then titillated Europeans. That voluptuous body shape was quickly linked to the steatopygia found among some African women and interpreted as evidence of an African influence on the Cro-Magnon (whitish) European culture.

The French archaeologist Edouard Piette** (1827-1906), a Palaeolithic pioneer, attributed the unusual condition of steatopygia that afflicted these Palaeolithic hunters to the presence of a Negroid race of Europe.

Needless to say, 'Negroid' and 'primitive' were easily conflated.

In this two-race theory, the Negroids were responsible for whatever appeared grotesque and savage, while more pleasing objects (such as the Lady with the Hood, pictured in a footnote below) were credited to the Cro-Magnons -- thus demonstrating a “search of beauty” by dead white males.

Although Piette admitted being puzzled by “racial differences within the collection of Venuses and the resemblance of some of them to African populations”(my italics), he was nonetheless certain that they were Negroid in origin. And he was equally certain that the figurines were meant “to be read literally as realistic depictions of human anatomy” since, as he said, all Paleolithic people were “profound realists [who] represented themselves [as they were] in engraving and sculpture.”

It's a pity Piette died before the Venus de Monpazier (right) was found in a newly-ploughed French field [Oo là là, elle est vraiment très française celle-là]: she would surely have been the proof of the pudding. Not only has she a decidedly right-angled bum but also the enlarged vulva characteristic of some steatopygous women as well. That is, she exhibits extreme labial hypertrophy, in which uncommonly long labia minora protrude from the outer lips (labia majora) of the vagina -- looking, when she stands, for all the world like a small penis, or, when reclining, as a dangling curtain of skin.

Such an 'unnatural' development in women is but a hop, skip and jump from proof of unbridled primitive sexuality.

Sex-Toys Я Us

After the first flush of European imperialism had run its course, race was out and sex moved in. The figurines were now understood as erotic objects used by Paleolithic men.

Sex and hunger were the two motives which influenced the entire mental life of the mammoth hunters and their productive art.

Strong male desires explained the origin of art: the Venuses were manufactured as erotic paraphernalia, providing pleasure to Paleolithic man during his meals . They also provided direct tactile and visual satisfaction. Art, in short, began as primitive pornography (or, if I may put it so, artefacts used with one hand).

The Dictionary of Medical Science agreed. In an essay written in 1819, a medical doctor wrote of black woman developing a voluptuousness and a degree of lascivity unknown to whites. He particularly stressed the consonance between the hideous form of the female Hottentot's physiognomy and sexual lasciviousness.

I would have thought that the desire to eat was unexceptional yet that, too, was brought into play:

"Among us [whites] the forehead is pushed forward, the mouth is pulled back as if we were destined to think rather than eat; the Negro has a shortened forehead and a mouth that is pushed forward as if he were made to eat instead of to think."

Enter the Hottentot Venus

This fetid stew of ultra-Negro savagery, primitive Negroids and sexual titillation was further stirred by a Khoikhoi woman named Saartjie Baartman -- the Hottentot Venus (left) -- who sailed into London in 1810.

The first time Saartjie Baartman was dragged out to squat before the mob at 225 Piccadilly, the show's promoters billed her genitals as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat. For several years, working-class Londoners crowded in to shout vulgarities at the protruding buttocks and large vulva of the unfortunate woman made famous across Europe as the "Hottentot Venus". The aristocracy were no less fascinated at what they saw as a sexual freak, but they had private showings.

The bizarre tale began in 1789, when Saartjie Baartman was born near the little village of Hankey on the Great Fish (Gamtoos) River in South Africa's Eastern Cape into the clan of Griqua people. The Griqua were called 'Hottentots' by the Dutch settlers, probably an onomatopoeic word imitating the clicking sounds of their language.

In her late teens, she migrated to Cape Town where she worked as a servant for a Boer farmer, Pieter Cezar. Colonial records show that in 1810 she was living in a small shack on his land when a British ship's doctor, William Dunlop, took an interest in her. He was fascinated by her large rump and genitalia -- exceptional even by Khoikhoi standards -- and was convinced he could capitalize on the prurient interest in primitive sexuality. Explorers of Africa had already spread stories about Hottentot women’s oversized buttocks and the mysterious 'Hottentot apron,' an enticing flap of skin covering the vaginal area.

Together with Pieter's brother Hendrik, Dunlop convinced the young woman to enter into a contract to sail with them to London, telling her that she would become rich by displaying her body. No doubt she saw the opportunity to live like the white colonialists in the Cape.

Baartman spent 4 years in London on display ostensibly for scientific purposes, but in truth as an extraordinary freak- show exhibit. In those days there was little distinction between zoological exhibitions and human freaks, whether women with hairy bodies and beards, or The Living Skeleton, or 'The Fattest Man on Earth' (weighing 700 lb., 317 kg), or a young lady measuring just 22½ inches tall (58 cm) whose stage name, the 'Sicilian Fairy', encapsulated both her size and frailty.

The supposedly excessive size of Baartman's buttocks and the 'Hottentot apron' fit the time perfectly. Her uncommon bum and genitals were an intellectually satisfying missing link between true (white) humans and the highest type of apes, the orang-utans.

Cezar advertised the show and billed Baartman as a “most correct specimen of her race.” The Hottentot Venus exhibition, which took place at 225 Egyptian Hall at the Piccadilly Circus, was instantly popular and inspired bawdy ballads and political cartoons (above left, two cartoon comments: "Oh! God Damn what roast beef!" and "Ah! how comical is nature."). A contemporary account describes how she was paraded on a "stage two feet high, along which she was led by her keeper and exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered."

Charles Matthews, comedian, who “was all his life a great sight-seer”, frequented the London neighbourhood in pursuit of the latest curiosities. Upon visiting Baartman:

He found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her; onegentleman poked her with his cane; one lady employed her parasol to ascertainthat all was, as she called it, ‘nattral.’ This inhuman baiting the poor creaturebore with sullen indifference, except upon some provocation, when she seemedinclined to resent brutality.... On these occasions it took all the authority of thekeeper to subdue her resentment.

The show also provoked outrage, as various witnesses described Baartman appearing nearly nude and being threatened with violence by her exhibitor. These complaints soon led to the intervention of the African Institution, an abolitionist organization that brought Hendrik Cezar to trial for practising slavery and public indecency. Baartman testified on her own behalf, but she did not corroborate stories of being held against her will and only complained about not having enough clothes to wear. The courts eventually dismissed the case but mandated that Cezar discontinue in the show’s indecency.

As a consequence, Cezar and Baartman moved to Paris in 1814, where she was abandoned (or sold) to a "showman of wild animals" at a travelling circus. The Hottentot Venus caused the same sensation in Paris as she had in London. When she was not being paraded for the hoi-polloi, Baartman was displayed at society functions.

It was at a ball for France's new establishment -- where she was dressed in nothing but a few feathers -- that Napoleon's surgeon general and founder of the disciplines of geology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy, Georges Cuvier, spotted her and claimed a scientific interest. Over the following year she was repeatedly studied by doctors and anthropologists, who invariably concluded that she was evidence of the superiority of the white race.

All this prodding and oogling took its toll on her, driving her into prostitution and alcoholism. She died in 1815, just five years after arriving in Europe. Descriptions of her death point to syphilis and tuberculosis as the cause. She was 25 years old.

Upon her death, Cuvier acquired her cadaver. Her body was first copied in a plaster-cast (right) and then dissected. In his 1817 scientific thesis, Histoire naturelle des mammifères, Cuvier unveiled the mystery of her 'apron' (which she had refused to display to him even when offered money) and compared her genitalia with those of apes, developing his theories on African women’s oversexed and subhuman status. Her bones were boiled and her brain and genitals bottled.

Her skeleton, pickled brain, and pickled sex organs were mounted for display and shown in the great Musée de l’Homme next to her naked plaster-cast -- the very first exhibits to be seen by a visitor in the foyer of the museum. She was only removed from public view in 1976.***

The Unexpected Palaeolithic Trilogy

Having allowed myself to be side-tracked by Saartjie Baartman's story, I don't have the heart to return to my little Palaeolithic female figurines for the moment. So we'll have to tackle the next great theory -- the figurines as objects used in fertility rites and rituals -- in a third post, when I also hope to bring the narrative up to our own time and, with any luck, to a conclusion.

* That is, the point at the top of the head dividing the body into left and right halves

** As it happens, the 'Treasures of Edouard Piette' are now being shown at the Musée des antiquités nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris. The exhibition includes the Venus of Brassempouy (left)- also known as the "Lady with the Hood" (discovered by Piette) - being shown in its original form to the public for the first time. From 29 Nov. 2008 - 2 March 2009.

*** Some Africans never forgot Baartman. Nelson Mandela made a request to France in 1994 for her remains to be handed back. Her cause gained momentum amid post-apartheid South Africa's new awareness of tribal identity. All over the country, aboriginal peoples were asserting their heritage rights, claiming not only political and cultural recognition, but also the restitution of ancestral lands. Baartman's tribe, now recognized by the United Nations as an indigenous First Nation, won a victory for tribal recognition by securing the return of the 'Hottentot Venus' : in March 2002, the French Senate finally agreed to return Baartman’s remains—including her preserved organs—to her homeland. She was buried near her birthplace on the River Gamtoos on 9 August 2002, South African Women’s Day.

Rachel Holmes, African Queen: The real life of the Hottentot Venus (Random House, 2007), reviewed by Caroline Elkins in the New York Times, "A Life Exposed":

It is difficult not to be propelled through “African Queen.” The story of Saartjie Baartman — the Hottentot Venus’s real name — is inherently fascinating, and littered with a diverse cast of highly unlikable characters....

Clifton Crais & Pamela Scully, Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography (Princeton University, 2009) reviewed by Kathryn Hughes in the TLS 7 August 2009:

...lust for the racial "other", a sentimental desire to see on of Rousseau's noble savages in person, and a more generalized freak show hysteria all lay behind the storm of interest which the "Hottentot's" presence produced at every level of British culture.

Below left: Kostienki I Venus, discovered in 1936. Her head is covered with rows of shallow teeth cuts, depicting hair or a closely fitting head-dress. Engraved and relief lines on the chest and on the back. Mammoth's tusk.

Photographs of Saartjie Baartman and cartoons are available at various sites on the Internet.

05 December 2008

This is the lovely new lady made of mammoth ivory from Zaraysk, Russia. She's 16.6 cm (6.7") tall. Although popularly known as 'Venuses' -- and one can see why -- the four views of our naked lady shows that she's not particularly voluptuous as Venuses go (compare the Gagarino Venus, below right), quite flat-chested in fact, though her hips, belly, and bum are shapely and round.

Mammoth Hunters

Zaraysk (about 150 km [95 miles] southeast of Moscow) is one of the mammoth hunter sites on the Russian plain, part of the Kostienki /Avdeevo culture during the Gravettian period of the last Ice Age. That's when humans were making the transition from functional tool-making to art and adornment. And Venuses were very much part of that story.

The Zaraysk hunters were never more than a small tribe of several dozen people. They lived in semi-subterranean pit-houses up to 5 metres long, with roofs made of mammoth ivory and covered with hides. The Zaraysk Venus was found in a deep storage pit, dating approximately 20,000 years ago, along with a smaller, unfinished sister. She was carefully buried on a deposit of fine sand, with red ochre spread about (the colour of blood), and the hole plugged with the shoulder-blade of a woolly mammoth.

It was a tough time to be alive -- a peri-glacial tundra world. Let's say, if the climate were any harsher, no people could have lived there at all. Still, there was one huge compensation: plenty of woolly mammoths roamed the tundra. Tremendous quantities of mammoth bones were found in the settlement, as well as bones of deer, hare, bison, birds and rodents. Wood was scarce, but flint, bone and ivory were plentiful, so that raw materials for food, fuel and tools were readily available.

Venuses from one end of Eurasia to the other

During the Gravettian, craftspeople were carving human and animal figurines right across the Eurasian land mass from the French Pyrenees to Lake Baikal in Siberia.* We'll just look at a few uppity women, leaving the beasts and rare male figurines for others to deal with.

There are over 100 female images -- or at least naked portions of the female anatomy -- carved in soft stone, mammoth ivory, and bone. They picture the full scope of womanhood, ranging from pre-pubescent girls to matronly women in various stages of pregnancy to much older, post-menopausal women. While there are drastic differences between La Belle France and Siberia, some similarities are striking regardless of time and place.

First of all, certain parts of the figure are emphasized while others are deliberately neglected. The hair-styles, breasts, abdomen, hips, thighs and vulva are usually exaggerated while the extremities (heads, arms, hands, legs, and feet) and facial features are often lacking. They are typically "bountiful, fat-layered and face-less", like the Avdeevo Venus (left).

But, as her new near-neighbour from Zaraysk clearly shows, there is no absolute rule: even breasts may be minimalized. Women are always uppity, I suppose, and refuse to be stereotyped.

The Zaraysk lady and her Facebook friends

All the Venuses I am illustrating come from the Kostienki /Avdeevo cultural area in southwest Russia and the Ukraine near the Black Sea.** The sheer number and variety of these female figurines is astonishing and they show remarkable similarities to one another as well as to the others across Europe.

That doesn't mean that they all look the same. On the contrary.

Below are four ladies from the Avdeevo site, dating to 22,000 years BCE. Though about the same height (15 cm), they range from slender to chubby, to fat and obese. The shoulders are narrow, the chests flattened and elongated, with large, almost teardrop-shaped breasts dropping to the belly below. The lady on the left is pregnant, the others possibly not. And the slender Venus (right) has unusual delicately carved facial features and lines representing a complicated hairstyle or headdress; this piece stands out against the great majority of females lacking faces.

Nakedness is relative

One important element of some of the ladies from this area is the fact that they are less naked than many of those elsewhere in Europe. While some are as naked as the day they were born, others wear enigmatic articles of clothing or woven-looking decoration.

This Venus on the right from Kostienki, for example.

Her great boobs rest on an almost circular belly. The faceless head bends towards her chest while the arms are pressed to the body, with her hands on the belly. The surface of her head is covered with rows of incisions indicating a hair style or headdress, which gives her head the look of a battered golf ball (indeed, this style is sometimes called 'golf ball heads'). So far, so characteristic. But lines that cross the chest form a breast ornament that runs around her body and is tied in the back -- looking for all the world like a bizarre, misplaced brazziere.

Such depictions of items of clothing has led to the idea that some Palaeolithic people may have already mastered the skills long thought to have arisen much later in human history: the ability to weave plant fibres into cloth, rope, nets and baskets.

"Also among the finds was an object carved from mammoth ivory, shaped like a cone with its top removed. The cone is densely ornamented and has a hole running through its centre.

The authors note that the object is unique among Palaeolithic artefacts. 'The function of this decorated object remains a puzzle,' they say."

I'm an archaeologist and can't resist a mystery: it looks awfully like later spindle whorls to me, the small round weights used in the spinning of thread which make the spindle revolve more smoothly.When you find them on archaeological sites (and they're all but indestructible), that's good evidence for local weaving.

Will chubby Venus please turn around?

This pregnant Venus, also from Kostienki and made of mammoth bone, shows the characteristic big hanging breasts of many such figures. In the rear view she can be seen wearing a fringe or girdle. Since the girdle doesn't circle her belly, I wonder (as one woman to another) how it ever stayed in place. However, that's not the burning question of the day. Rather, I'd like to focus on her grossly over-developed buttocks -- for she is undoubtedly steatopygous -- and it was such a rump that gave rise to the first great theory to explain the meaning of the Venuses.

That bum theory, and many of the ideas that followed, will be the subject of the second part of this post.

** Paleolithic figurines are classified by their homelands: the Pyrenees-Aquitaine Group (Southwestern France); an Italian Mediterranean Group; the Rhine-Danube Group, which boasts the most widely known female figurine, the Venus of Willendorf ; our own Russian Group (southwest Russia and the Ukraine near the Black Sea), and the far away Siberian Group.

Illustrations:

Zaraysk Venus: discovered by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published in Antiquity.

Harvard archaeologists discovered flax fibres that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibres known to have been used by humans. The fibres were discovered during excavations in a cave in the Republic of Georgia.

The flax, which would have been collected from the wild and not farmed, could have been used to make linen and thread which would then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another.

The fibres are too tiny to know exactly how their purpose but there is good evidence that the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the cave had cut, twisted and dyed the flax (pictures here). Harvard team leader Ofer Bar-Yosef said they represent evidence of a "critical invention for early humans."

So it now seems probable that the Kostienki and other Palaeolithic Venuses are indeed wearing items of woven cloth.

It just took science a little time to catch up with their dress sense.

23 November 2008

At the Amsterdam All-Zenobia Day (which already feels like half a year ago. Oh, it is.... Sorry for the delay), Arjan Senden, a Dutch numismatist -- and specialist in Roman coins and medals -- presented a sensational new find: an addition to the very very limited and always rare coins minted for Zenobia.

Here she is (left), a simple bronze coin, but the title says it all:

S. ZENOBIA AUG

That's monetary shorthand for 'Septimia Zenobia Augusta', her brazen claim to the imperial throne. To hammer home the point, the reverse shows the goddess Juno with the text IUNO REGINA, Queen [of the gods] -- as imperial a reverse as she could possibly choose.

The coin was found somewhere in Israel, and its text in Latin (rather than Greek) suggests that it was struck in one of the three small-change mints in the neighbourhood: Berytus, Ptolemais (modern Acco), or Tyre. Although it's not sure that any of these civil mints were still in operation as late as the 270's AD, yet, as Arjan says, the nice black patina of the coin does have the look of these regional coins.

Well, I am willing to bet an equal weight of Euro-change (10.97 grams) that Zenobia's issuer will turn out to be Phoenician Tyre.

First, because the last Empress known to have had coins produced at Tyre with the title of Augusta was Salonina, wife of Gallienus, who died only a few years earlier (empress 253-268 AD). So, even if the local mint had closed for a dozen years or so, it could easily have been reopened. And the coin is made in a rude manner, which is consistent with the work of a secondary or 'auxiliary' mint: the edge shows at one place a rough little piece, cut from a series produced with a mould. This normally happens with coins of an auxiliary mint during a campaign, rapidly producing coins to pay the troops.

Badges of Honour

I would add that there is an interesting link between Tyre and Palmyra. An inscribed marble base found in Tyre may once have held a statue dedicated to Zenobia's husband. It reads (in Greek):

To Septimius Odenathus, the most illustrious (senator?). The Septimian colony of Tyre.

So, the great warrior prince Odenathus had earned public honours at Tyre during his lifetime. Zenobia was certainly sensible enough to have kept up these close ties. The moment that Tyrian coins acknowledged her as Empress might have come when Palmyran troops were moving through the area on their way into Egypt in the years 270-272 AD.

Coins of Honour

The closest parallel for the new coin must be the bronze piece found at Palmyra itself (left) in 1960. It was mistakenly classed as a tesserae, a token, but it is clearly a coin and also produced in an auxiliary mint (my amateur guess is Damascus). It too is in Latin and closely copies the finer, more familiar -- but still very rare -- Zenobia coinage of Antioch (in black & white below).

I don't know why anyone thinks these are real portraits of Zenobia. However many times the Syrian Tourist Office or Palmyran guidebooks reproduce these coins, they remain entirely stereotypical images of a mid-third century empress. Her bust is set on a crescent moon. Her features are youthful and regular. Even though the fleshiness of the nose or the roundness of the chin may change, such changes seem random rather than attempted portraiture. Her head is crowned by a diadem and the very characteristic hairstyle follows the pattern introduced by Tranquillina (empress 241-244), the wife of Gordian III: her wavy hair is divided into bands, leaving the ear free, and gathered into a braid pulled up from the neck to the forehead.

So what did Zenobia look like?

Two coins from Alexandria may hold the clue. The first (below, left) is another typical genre portrait, not much different -- except for language -- from the Antiochene coins: youthful regular features, with little individuality. The hairstyle follows another fixed pattern -- dating back to Julia Mamaea (so possibly a more authentically Syrian style), but also copied in the early Alexandrian coinage of Salonina (so you could argue that it's fashionable and nothing more) -- with longer waves and caught in a soft bun at the neck. In any case, this is another conventional portrait of an empress; the Alexandrian mint surely had no portrait of Zenobia to hand so they seem to have modelled her after a late Severan Syrian empress.

But a second Alexandrian issue (below, right) presents a very different picture. Probably struck not many months after the first, this Zenobia looks like another woman entirely.

Is this the real portrait of Zenobia?

No longer youthful, but early middle-aged (as was likely to be true), the empress has strong, even sharp features, a high forehead, long aquiline nose, strong chin, and large ears. Her expression, too, is changed -- now having something (according to one expert*) of oriental solemnity about her. I'm not sure I'd go that far. But, yes, I otherwise agree: this is another woman, a far more realistic portrayal than the other, off-the-shelf imperial portraits.

Here's another view of the second Alexandrian issue, a modern mould taken from one of the coins (left).

If any picture is the real Zenobia, this is it!

Why else did the Alexandrian mint strike a second, quite distinct series of coins -- so soon after the first -- if they didn't mean to portray the new empress much more as she really was?

15 November 2008

At a Pentagon promotion ceremony yesterday, Ann E. Dunwoody ascended to a peak never before reached by a woman in the U.S. military: four-star general, the U.S. army's highest rank.* By law, the Army is limited to 11 active-duty four-stars.

Through the Brass Ceiling

Ann E Dunwoody is now head of the Army Material Command, in charge of weapons, equipment and uniforms for the army. There's a lot of that stuff about.

She said she had never expected to rise so high in the ranks in her career.

In the U.S. army, there are 21 female generals, most of them one-star. The first female one-star was named in 1970, the first two-star in 1978 and the first three-star in 1996. Women make up 14% of the army's active-service strength of more than 500,000 soldiers.

Behind every successful woman there's an astonished man

"There is no one more surprised than I, except of course, my husband," she told an auditorium packed with the military's top brass.

Gen Dunwoody is married to Ret. Air Force Col. Craig Brotchie (on her right in the video below).

Gen. Ann Dunwoody takes over her service's Material Command amid efforts to repair, upgrade and replace huge amounts of weapons, vehicles and gear used in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an interview with Defence News, she says she plans to build on wartime advances in the way the service tracks, stores and manages its equipment. She's pretty sanguine about it. The U.S. taxpayer, maybe, less so.

A member of Dunwoody's family has served in every American war since the Revolution. Her 89-year-old father, Ret. Brig. General Harold H. Dunwoody, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts. Her niece just returned from a tour in Afghanistan as an Air Force pilot. And her brother-in-law was an Air Force veteran.

Not eligible to attend the then all-male U.S. Military Academy -- like her brothers, father, grandfather and great-grandfather -- Dunwoody graduated from the State University of New York and was commissioned into the Women's Army Corps in 1975.

"So I went down to Fort McClellan as a college junior for six weeks of training. It was kind of exciting. Truly, I thought this would be a two-year detour en route to my teaching profession, but I was also excited that someone was going to pay me to jump out of airplanes. Here we are, 33 years later."

So, what's it like to be the U.S. military's first female four-star general?

It is very humbling. I am very grateful to the generations of women who have gone before me and opened the doors through their determination and commitment. I keep telling people I have been so fortunate that I have worked for and with people who have given me opportunities throughout my career. You can be motivated and talented, but if people don't give you those opportunities, you may or may not be able to reach the potential that you have.

I know what she means. In 1975, an Army study found that both men and women in the military agreed the best role for a female soldier was as a cook.

Let's hear it for the cook!

When she was nominated as a four-star (a rank that must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate), Gen Dunwoody said:

“I grew up in a family that didn’t know what glass ceilings were. This nomination only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career, that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform.”

Women soldiers throughout the crowd yesterday cheered, some as they wiped tears of joy. Gen Dunwood needs to be an inspiration for girls out there, too. Let's make sure that girls hear the news:

Yes, you can!

But the closet door is still closed for gays. Now, isn't it time that those doors opened as well?

* the "five-star general" or General of the Army is reserved for war-time use only and is not currently used in the 21st century U.S. military.

08 November 2008

No, I am not not pointing a Grimm-like Hansel & Gretel finger at the Israeli archaeologist, Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem (shown left, setting out her wares). Although she is responsible for finding the uppity Israeli witch.

Her team recently discovered in a small Israeli cave a woman’s skeleton pinned down in an unusual position by large stones and accompanied by a rare collection of grave offerings -- including 50 complete tortoise shells , the pelvis of a leopard, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the tail of a wild cow, two marten skulls (a member of the weasel family), the forearm of a wild boar, and a large human foot belonging to another person entirely.

Of course, 'witch' is only the newspaper term applied to the woman (as in Tomb Raider Digs Up Witch). She's not a witch at all ... but a shaman. A Natufian (Middle Stone Age) shaman -- one of the earliest known from the archaeological record.

The Natufians were a people who lived 11,500 to 15,000 years ago in what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Most archaeologists see Natufian culture as a transition between hunting and gathering and the sedentary lifestyles of early farmers. Finding an early shaman grave during this transition makes sense. These people are starting to live in more permanent communities; they're in more contact with one another from day to day. We start to see evidence for new ritualized behaviours at this point in time.The Shaman

The word shaman is derived from the Vedic śram , meaning 'to heat oneself' or to practice austerities. But the type is much more archaic, being part of the prehistoric cultures of Siberian hunters and proto-historical peoples in almost all parts of the world, and shamanism continues to this day wherever hunter-gatherer bands still survive . The shaman is everywhere a mystical, priestly figure -- a healer, seer and visionary.

I am she who puts together, she who speaks, she who searches. I am she who looks for the spirit of the day. I search where there is fright and terror. I am she who fixes, she who cures the person that is sick.

Shamans have mastered death. In visions and dreams, they entered the realm of the dead. Their intense suffering in this other world and their subsequent recovery establishes the shaman as one who has met death and been reborn. The spirit of light is now within: ''something that gleams like fire, that gives the power to see with closed eyes into the darkness, into the hidden things'. The shaman can communicate with the world of gods and spirits:

Slowly I perceived that a voice was trying to tell me something. It was a bird cry, but I tell you, I began to understand some of it. That happens sometimes. I know a lady who had a butterfuly sitting on her shoulder. That butterfly told her things. This made her become a great medicine woman.

The shaman's spirit ascends into the sky. The soul is transformed into a bird, the wings and body of the spirit-bird.

I heard a human voice, strange and high-pitched, which could not come from an ordinary living being. All at once I was way up there with the birds. I could look down even on the stars, and the moon was close to my left side. It seemed as though the earth and the stars were moving below me. A voice said, 'You are sacrificing yourself here to be a medicine man. In time you will be one. You will teach other medicine men . We are the bird people, the winged ones, the eagles and the owls.'

Inside Hilazon Tachtit Cave

The she-shaman's remains were discovered in a cave at Hilazon Tachtit, west of the Sea of Galilee. The cave functioned as a burial site for at least 28 other individuals. But only the shaman was treated differently. Her skeleton was separated from the other bodies by a circular wall of stones. In addition, at least 10 large stones had been placed on the head, pelvis and arms of the body, which the researchers suggest helped to protect the corpse and keep it in a specific position, or possibly to hold the body in its grave. She was also buried in an unusual position, lain on her side against the curved wall of the oval-shaped grave. Her legs were spread apart and folded inward at the knees.Grosman said the elaborate nature of the burial rituals and the method used to construct and seal the grave suggest the woman had a very high standing within her community.

Analysis of the bones shows that the shaman was about 45 years old. The wearing of her teeth and other ageing signs on the bones suggested the woman was old for her time. She was 1.5 m in height [4' 9"] and had an unnatural, asymmetrical appearance due to a spinal disability -- a fusing of the coccyx and sacrum along with deformations of the pelvis and lower vertebrae -- that would have affected her gait, causing her to limp or drag her foot.

The Natufians went to great lengths to construct a unique grave at the top of a 150-meter (450') slope in order to bury a relatively old and disabled woman.

Many descriptions of shamanism have noted that healing and spiritual powers have often been attributed to physically disabled individuals. In 2006, researchers re-examined a 9,000-year–old woman’s skeleton and grave offerings from a German site and concluded that she had been a shaman. Skull abnormalities would have caused the woman to experience altered states of consciousness that were seen by others as signs of spiritual powers. The researchers based this ideaon reports of similar skeletal deformities in modern people that cause numbness, itching, tingling and other unusual sensations."Clearly a great amount of time and energy was invested in the preparation, arrangement and sealing of the grave," Grosman said, adding that the burial site was unlike any other found in the Natufian or the preceding prehistoric periods. Hundreds of Natufian graves have been excavated in the Near East but, the she-shaman was not buried like others with everyday items and tools, as hunters, warriors, or political leaders were. Ancient community members must have perceived the woman as having a close relationship with the spirits of the animals buried with her -- hence, the arranged turtle shells and parts of wild pigs, eagles, cows, leopards, martens, not to mention that gory human foot.

All this sheds some light on Natufian rituals, says Grosman in this month's journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, the tortoise shells were scattered around and beneath the body. Before arranging the shells inside the grave, humans cracked open the tortoise shells along the reptiles' bellies (so as not to crack the back part of the shell) and sucked out the meat, either as food or for an offering to the dead. They carefully took out the insides by breaking the belly, but left the back intact. The empty shells were then placed around the deceased woman. Pig bones were cracked open and their marrow removed before the bones were placed beneath the woman's hand.

Burials of shamans often reflected their role in life, incorporating healing kits and animals whose spirits were considered to have a special connection with the shaman. "Tortoises, cow tails, eagle wings, and fur-bearing animals continue to play important symbolic and shamanistic roles in the spiritual arena of human cultures worldwide today," Grosman writes.

WHICH CAME FIRST?

Did shamanism help set off the cultural upheavals that accompanied the agricultural revolution in the Near East?

Or was it (as we know of it today), rather, the result of the very same changes?

Such a profound transition from a nomadic, hunting-gathering culture to a sedentary, agriculture-based lifestyle was surely accompanied by new rules, rituals, and belief systems. That's only natural. When things change dramatically, people tend to try to re-establish the legitimate order of things by using ritual and religion to deal with change.

A little like Sarah Palin, really.

Perhaps in a strange way, too -- and a world away -- this Papua New Guinea shaman could be one of the last spiritual descendants of that Uppity Natufian witch of 12,000 years ago.

30 October 2008

Let us honor with inspired hymns the two martyrs for truth: the preachers of true devotion, Zenóbius and Zenobía; as brother and sister they lived and suffered together and through martyrdom received their incorruptible crowns.

Today the Orthodox church calendar commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Zenobia and her brother, Zenobius.

Since this is an annual event, I won't repeat the story but point you to last year's post of 31 October (I was a day late in 2007. Shame!). Their history is complex -- not to say confused -- and it's all the fault of the 10th C Byzantine monk, Symeon Metaphrastes. Click over to that post -- Zenobia: Martyr Saint of Celicia and her brother -- and see what you can make of it. A year's reflection has not made me any wiser. You might be luckier.

There are not many images of Zenobia and Zenobius -- and one icon is uglier than the other. Here they are, though, with St Eutropia, who also met a sticky end -- and the Apostle Kleopas, one of the Seventy; he of 'the road to Emmaus' fame (Luke 24:13-33). All are celebrated on 30 October.

Speaking of icons, my next post will finally get back to Queen Zenobia. I'll be publishing a new coin find with our dear queen's image. So, lots of pictures ... and back on topic: coming soon.

29 October 2008

I was shocked to open my inbox and find that Zenobia Hikes had died during the night. She was only 53.

She died of complications following multiple heart surgeries.

As vice-president for student affairs at Virginia Tech, she helped shepherd the university through the days following the campus massacre on 16 April 2007.

She was a member of the group of Tech executives known as the policy group that gathered on the morning of April 16 2007 to deal with the shooting deaths of two students in a dormitory. As they were meeting, gunman Seung-Hui Cho entered a nearby hall and killed another 30 victims.

Of course, I never met her but, like millions of others, I watched her on television at the convocation held the following day. Her warmth, courage, and compassion helped rally the spirits of grieving students. And seemed to give some meaning to the madness that had happened.

Ed Spencer, interim vice-president, says, "I remember walking over to the convocation on April 17 and realizing how remarkably calm and reassuring she was, knowing what she was about to say as the moderator of ceremonies for the convocation, and we all know what an incredible job she really did for that."

And John Gray Williams, a student, remembers this: I'll never forget how inspired she made me feel when, only days after I'd met her back during my first semester here at Tech, I passed her on the Drillfield and she called out to me by name, "Oh, hello, John Gray." Really!? Did a vice president of this university of 30,000 really just remember my name? But that's how she was. If you took the time to seek her out and talk to her about any sort of student issues, she took the time to remember your name -- and the issue. She took the concerns I (and others) brought to her to heart.

Another student, Mohawk-John Woods, writes in his Live Journal, "This won't matter much to most of you non-Hokies [Virginia Tech folk], but it matters to us. Zenobia Hikes was one of the few administrators I still felt I could trust after the shooting -- and I suspect that to be true for others, too. She always worked so hard for us, and always listened."

I meant to write a blog post about her one day -- under the rubric Zenobia's Hall of Fame (21st C. AD) [sadly, I noted this morning that the link has stopped working].

I never imagined it would be a R.I.P.

But I can tell you, John Woods, her death does matter to most of us. As you said, Zenobia Hikes, you are sorely missed.

More information on this vibrant woman at In Memoriam: Dr. Zenobia Lawrence Hikes

14 October 2008

An exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York will soon explore the many ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not just to their personal fulfilment but to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world as well.

Worshipping Women seeks to correct "the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals ... was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society."

I wish them luck.

Of course, a woman's life wasn't 'unremittingly bleak' but it was certainly unremittingly patriarchal. The idea of women taking part in the public business of the polis would have seemed inherently comical to Athenian citizens (males only, of course). That's what's behind Aristophanes, in some of his surviving plays, where he chuckles, gurgles, and snorts at women pretending to take on the roles of men instead of staying at home. The women are well aware of what men think about them:

Men never speak a good word, never one, for the feminine gender,Everyone says we're a Plague,the source of all evils to man,war, dissension, and strife

Still, as Onassis knows, the only area in which women had any power at all was in religion. Public ritual gave a woman the only chance she had (if she were respectable) to get out of the house and even, sometimes, to mingle with men. And that made husbands nervous. Especially in Dionysus’ cult, women had an outlet for worship equal or greater to that afforded to men. In the spirit of Dionysian revelry, women could become his priestesses or 'Bacchae' simply by drinking, dancing, singing, and releasing their inhibitions.

Then, there were also women-only festivals where men were excluded. Naturally, they didn't like being excluded -- but they were stuck: such rites were sanctioned by ancestral tradition. There are anecdotes and legends about men who tried to spy on women's secret rituals. After all, they had to know. They had a right to know. Unsurprisingly, the spied-upon sometimes responded with lethal fury. But not always.

The most venerable women-only rite in Athens, the Thesmophoria, held in autumn at the time of sowing, included hurling pigs into snake-filled crevices, and strict observance of sexual abstinence. Women left their homes to set up a tent city close to the site of the public Assembly of men.

Let us now devote ourselves to the sports which the women are accustomed to celebrate here, when time has again brought round the mighty Mysteries of the great goddesses, the sacred days....

But all they really did at such festivals, so men feared, was give vent to their legendary potential for defiance and subversiveness. And drink undiluted wine -- as Aristophanes reported, they took an oath sworn over cups of the best rich, dark wine never to mix their wine with water!

Oh! you wanton, you tippling women, who think of nothing but wine; you are a fortune to the drinking-shops and are our ruin; for the sake of drink, you neglect both your household and your [weaving] shuttle!

Men of ancient Athens surely laughed at Aristophanes' plays and this lampooning of women, but it may have been uneasy laughter. Did they really fear that their wives were secret alcoholic nymphomanics -- adulterous, lecherous, bibulous, treacherous and garrulous to boot! All vice, in short, and the curse of their husbands.

There is but one thing in the world worse than a shameless woman, and that's another woman.

Ladies, I offer terms...

Aristophanes finally made his peace with women. At the end of his play about the Thesmophoria, he tells the troublesome matrons:

If well and truly, your honourable sex befriend me now, I won't abuse your honourable sex from this time forth for ever.

Non-abusive banter only, I am sure, at the Onassis Cultural Center 10 December 2008 t0 9 May 2009. It may well be worth a trip to the city since Greek newspapers say that many objects will be seen for the first time in New York.

Does that mean that Ladies are usually relegated to the storerooms? Surely not.

Above: Statue of the Goddess Artemis,ca. 100 B.C. From Delos (found in the House of the Diadoumenos). Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

Below: A Spartan woman victor in the foot-race at the Heraean Games, ca. 460 B.C., Vatican Museum, fitting a description by Pausanias, which says that the girls competed divided into three teams according to their age. During events their hair was allowed to fall loose on their shoulders and they wore a short chiton tunic which reached down to their knees but left bare their left shoulder and breast. As in the case of male Olympic winners, the prize for them too was a wreath of wild olive as well as the right to dedicate a tablet depicting themselves at the temple of Hera.

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About Me

I studied Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford (M.Litt.) and am a member of the British School at Athens. I excavated for many years on Crete and on the Greek mainland and travelled extensively in the Middle East. I have lived and worked among the ruins of the three great Caravan Cities: Petra, Palmyra, and Baalbek. It was at Palmyra in Syria that I began to tell the story of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, and the rebellion that she led against imperial Rome. I was living within the grounds of the Temple of Bel, and at night, when the great gates of the temple were shut, I came closer to the spirit of the time and place than probably anyone has ever done before. I know that I felt very close to Zenobia, which made the book a joy for me to write.

IS THIS ZENOBIA'S REAL PORTRAIT?

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These are five blogs I enjoy reading the most, and without which life would be less interesting for me: David Meadows' Rogue Classicism is my number one go-to blog.... My second choice is Judith Weingarten's Zenobia - she covers strong ancient women, not just Zenobia, and since these warrior women are the subject of my next book, I love her lengthy well-researched posts. PHDiva"Judith Weingarten, author of The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen writes about gods, kings, war and chivalry here. Written with pace and verve it is a fantastic and exciting analysis."Mike @ Official Osprey Publishing Blog

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"Judith's blog, Zenobia: Empress of the East is a treasure trove of insights into early history, but also the explorers, scholars and archaeologists who uncovered the ancient world."Martin@The Lay Scientist